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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24761434">Last Bus Nowhere</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_MX/pseuds/A_MX'>A_MX</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Canon-Typical Violence, Fan Characters, Fan Statement, Gen, Hallucinations, Sort-Of Canon Compliant, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), Statements, honestly no clue what to put here, in theory, unreality</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 06:35:35</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,891</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24761434</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_MX/pseuds/A_MX</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Statement of Sean Burke, regarding a series of strange happenings at his workplace near Cork, Ireland, between 2007 and 2010. Original statement given January 27, 2011. Audio recording by Alexandria Chapman, Dunham Hill Grammar School, archival intern at the Magnus Institute, London.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Last Bus Nowhere</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Uhm. Yeah. First time fic-writing for TMA, judge gently pls. I would place this anywhere in the first half of S1, probably. Also, I don't know the first thing about TMA fandom tagging etiquette, pls excuse that.</p>
<p>The following warnings apply: <strong>unreality, death, hallucinations, mental illness, accusations of gaslighting</strong>.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <h3 class="western">[CLICK]</h3><h4 class="western">Alexandria</h4>
<p class="western">Statement of Sean Burke, regarding a series of strange happenings at his workplace near Cork, Ireland, between 2007 and 2010. Original statement given January 27, 2011. Audio recording by Alexandria Chapman, Dunham Hill Grammar School, archival intern at the Magnus Institute, London.</p>
<p class="western">Statement begins.</p><h4 class="western">Alexandria (statement)</h4>
<p class="western">They say it was an accident. There was nobody in there with him. There’s no cameras inside, but all the exits are covered by CCTV at night, and he was the only one who went in… and he never came back out. It has to be an accident, right?</p>
<p class="western">Maybe I should start at the beginning. I work at a— I <em>used to</em> work at a bus company, down in the neighbourhood of Cork. <em>Burns &amp; Higgins Tourist Transportations</em>. I didn’t drive any of the buses, mind you – I was in the workshop. We had our own, you see, so that when one of our vehicles needed repairs or maintenance, we could do it in-house. I’ve been with the company since for five years – well, right now, I’m on leave. I don’t think I’ll be going back.</p>
<p class="western">Burns &amp; Higgins operate quite the fleet: 207 cars in total. We do everything, from airport transfer, to class trips, cross-country trips, complete with tour guides. So you can imagine that we’re quite busy, we barely get one of them back on the road when the next one rolls up with some sort of defect. Those drivers will file a damage report over nothing, but we have to inspect the car and make sure it’s nothing before we send it back out.</p>
<p class="western">The #135 had never been much of a problem. Ran as smoothly as any mechanic could wish for. That was, until three years ago. That’s when she began acting up, and that’s when it all went downhill.</p>
<p class="western">We’d gotten a new mechanic that year. Justin Webb, had only just moved here from the States. A bit odd, but not any more so than the rest of us, and he was a reliable man, always very punctual, always thorough work, so there was never any reason to complain. But fact remains, a few weeks after he joined us, #135 changed, and it’s never been the same since.</p>
<p class="western">Nothing big, at first. Halfway between Dublin and Belfast, UK road police stopped the bus because there was smoke coming out back. The heating had broken. They drove the rest of the trip in the cold and when they got back, we swapped out the burner and sent her on her next trip.</p>
<p class="western">But it got worse. Two months later, I had to drive out to Kilkenny because the computer had gone dark. We never figured out what did it, but somehow, the thing had wiped its own memory and I had to tow her all the way back home so we could take apart the entire system.</p>
<p class="western">Ever since, the #135 has been a regular. No month would pass without a driver bringing her in for a fault: the motor control would report an error, the transmission wouldn’t shift, the lights would go on and off unprompted. Whenever this particular bus came in, it would be an unspoken discussion about which poor sod’s turn it was to look after her. I never asked, but I can’t imagine our drivers didn’t notice, and they probably liked her as little as we did.</p><h3 class="western">[ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO HEAR STATIC]</h3>
<p class="western">One and a half years into this, the vehicle was decommissioned. The manufacturer took her back to let their engineers find out what was wrong with her and sent us a shiny new bus. The whole crew felt like we’d gotten a load off our backs when the replacement arrived, all new, latest model. Colm – that was our chief mechanic, Colm MacNamara – himself christened the new car with a bottle of champagne and stuck a brand new #135 decal on her. Same registry number, new car, I feel like we should have known it wouldn’t end like this. To him, it was just one problematic vehicle out of the way, and for free. He never really saw what we saw.</p>
<p class="western">Two months into service, the new #135 broke down. Ten miles outside Cork, twenty-five litres of gearbox oil emptied themselves onto the motorway and the bus was dead in the water. We had to send Justin with the tow truck to bring her back. And just like that, the streak began anew. By the time we’d operated the replacement for a year, there was no error code in the manual we hadn’t seen first-hand, no unlikely or borderline impossible accident it hadn’t been brought in after.</p>
<p class="western">The Friday before St Nick’s Day 2009, the entire staff showed up in Colm’s office and demanded the company retire the #135. I don’t remember if the word ‘cursed’ was ever said, or ‘haunted’, but it was clear what we meant. Colm, he, he laughed us out of his office. There was nothing wrong with the bus that we couldn’t fix, he said, and if we saw ghosts, then maybe we should wait with the eggnog until Christmas.</p>
<p class="western">I said the entire staff. That’s… not <em>entirely</em> accurate. Through all this, whenever anyone complained about #135, when we confronted Colm, one of us was always absent. I’m sure by now you guessed it.</p>
<p class="western">Justin Webb. He had spent more time than anyone else fixing that damn thing’s moods, but he never complained. He wasn’t very shy usually, so it was really quite odd, but nobody noticed at the time.</p>
<p class="western">After that Christmas, that was when it started.</p>
<p class="western">The noises.</p><h3 class="western">[<b>FAINT HUMMING</b>]</h3>
<p class="western">I was working late when it first happened. Half of us were already home, and it was just a few of us – me, Alana Machovec, Gordon Kenneth, Jared Livingston – hoping to get some leftover work done before the weekend. I was up in the back of that wretched bus, replacing the exhaust temperature sensor, when I thought I heard someone giggling. Of course, I assumed that one of the others had said something funny, although it didn’t sound like it had come from outside. Rather… inside the bus, maybe from the driver’s seat. Nevertheless, I was trying to get work done, you see, so I paid it no mind.</p><h3 class="western">[<b>HUMMING BEGINS DISTORTING</b><b></b>]</h3>
<p class="western">It happened again, though, and after fifteen, or maybe twenty, minutes of giggling every now and then, I decided to tell the others to shut it. I mean, I wanted nothing more than to get the damn job done and go home to Brittany, my girlfriend at the time. So I crawled out from behind the panelling, wiggled myself out between the seats, and stormed to the door with nothing less but a whole lot of righteous anger.</p>
<p class="western"><em>[whispered]</em> the workshop was empty.</p>
<p class="western">One of us, Jared, was at the far end of the place, welding a new wheelchair ramp to the frame of one of our school buses, the #065. A terrible, outdated car, but looking back, I wish I had been in his place and worked his job. The door to storage was slightly ajar and the lights were on, so I guess that’s where Alana and Gordon were, getting spare parts. But nobody was anywhere near enough to be the one whose laughter had pestered me.</p><h3 class="western">[NOISE FADES]</h3>
<p class="western">I let it rest, got back inside, and finished the job. I think I slept bad that night, but the week after, I had already forgotten the incident, just another bad day in a history of improbable defects. But it happened again.</p>
<p class="western">And again.</p>
<p class="western">And again.</p>
<p class="western">Nobody else ever seemed to hear it, or maybe they did and just never mentioned it. We were all pretty sure by then that something about the #135 was not of this world. Even Gordon, who took pride in his rational thinking and his refusal to believe in any ‘hanky-panky’, had stopped objecting when one of us talked about bad luck and jinxes and meaningfully nodded at the bus. Of course, Justin never said anything, neither in agreement nor in opposition, but like I said, we were used to it. Maybe he took some wicked sort of pride in putting the thing back together time and again, or at least, that’s what we thought.</p>
<p class="western">It was a month before the incident when the footsteps began. At least, that’s when I noticed them. I mean, there’s a <em>lot</em> of foot traffic when you’ve got a dozen people fixing buses, so it’s quite possible I just didn’t notice earlier. But that day, I did. The #135 was on the hydraulic lift and I was operating it, taking her up for Alana to inspect the front axle, when I heard footsteps. The sound of someone pacing, back and forth, cut through all the noise – not quite loud, actually fairly quiet even, but I heard it, over Colm arguing with Jared, over Gordon’s pneumatic drill, I heard it.</p>
<p class="western">I ushered Alana out from under the car and brought her back down. We couldn’t have anyone inside the vehicle while it was up in the air, and I couldn’t imagine who could be inside.</p>
<p class="western">You know what happened, don’t you?</p>
<p class="western">It was empty.</p>
<p class="western">Nobody pacing. No feet to make those sounds.</p>
<p class="western">Alana gave me the weirdest look when I came back out, and I don’t think she heard it. I didn’t say anything, and we proceeded with the inspection. I had almost convinced myself it had been a hallucination, or my imagination, that some tool had fallen down and I had mistaken the sound for footsteps. I took the following week off on short notice and hoped that a little relaxation would make the problem go away.</p>
<p class="western">And then, after two months during which nothing exciting happened, when I had almost started to believe that whatever curse was haunting us had gone forever, came that fateful Friday. If I had stayed in bed, never showed up for work, had gotten myself fired, I would have made the wiser choice. But how was I to know?</p>
<p class="western">This time, it was the engine. Shot to bits and nobody knew why, but all of us were fed up, and a general atmosphere of barely contained anger was in the air. Everybody respectfully shut up whenever Colm was within earshot, of course, but we all knew what the rest of us thought. Enough was enough, and if things had gone different, Monday would probably have seen the whole repair crew in the boss’ office to demand this god-awful abomination be scrapped for good. Either way, fact remained, the #135 needed a new engine, and Justin and I were the ones Colm sent to do it. We had a spare, from one of our other cars where the transmission had gone to hell, so we were all set to start taking her apart. While Justin sat in the driver’s seat and looked through the computer log, I was in the back, getting started by opening up the compartment under the last row of seats. That was when I heard it.</p><h3 class="western">[FAINT STATIC]</h3>
<p class="western">The laughter. And the footsteps.</p>
<p class="western"><em>[whispers]</em> Right over my shoulder.</p>
<p class="western">I dropped the wrench and spun around and of course I found nothing. But this time, with Justin here, I thought I’d caught the culprit. So up I got and stormed to the front, to tell him exactly where he should stick his twisted sense of humour. In that moment of fury, I was sure to have found the reason for all my problems, that somehow, he had been playing some sort of elaborate, sick prank on me this entire time and by God, I was going to make him answer for that.</p>
<p class="western">When I asked why exactly he thought scaring the hell outta me with his laughter and footsteps was funny, Justin looked up from the diagnostic monitor and went very silent and very pale. It took me a few minutes of repeated questioning to get it out of him that he hadn’t done anything at all, and the sight of his fear written all over his face was enough to make my anger dissipate into nothingness. I got back to work, and by the time evening rolled around, we had gotten the entire rear dismantled enough to expose the engine, and come Monday, we would be able to detach the old engine and start getting ready to put the new one in. It’s a two or three man job, and you need a lifting cart, which we only had one of.</p><h3 class="western">[LOUDER STATIC]</h3>
<p class="western">Throughout the afternoon, I had occasionally heard the faintest hint of footsteps again, and every time I had angrily glared at Justin, whose nervousness seemed to grow exponentially as the time passed. When we filed out and Colm locked up behind us, I grumbled something to Justin about seeing him the following week, and I’ll never forget his words when he answered: ‘don’t count on it’.</p>
<p class="western">He was halfway to his car before I could ask what he meant.</p>
<p class="western">I didn’t sleep well that weekend. I can’t quite remember the nightmares I had, but all of them ended with me waking up desperately searching the bedroom for the person who had woken me up with their laughter. It messed me up good enough that on Monday, I was running late for work after sleeping through my alarm.</p>
<p class="western">It was Ralph who found him. Ralph Doherty, one of the electricians. He had come early, said he’d forgotten his phone at his workbench Friday evening, and went in when Colm arrived to open up. By the time I got there, it was already over, and the police were there.</p>
<p class="western">An accident, they said. Apparently, CCTV had caught Justin sneaking back in over the weekend, and he had started working on the #135. By the looks of it, he’d attempted to swap out the engine all on his own, and it had come down and buried him. Crushed him. 450kg of metal had left quite the impact on him.</p>
<p class="western">How he had gotten in, past the guard, the dogs, the locks none of us had a key to, they couldn’t say. But the video and his bloodied remains left little doubt. A few of us threw up when we saw him. I’m not ashamed to say I was one of them.</p><h3 class="western">[STATIC BEINGS TO FADE]</h3>
<p class="western">All of us got plenty time off while the <em>Gardai</em> investigated the place. Alana, Ralph, and Jared have gone back since. Gordon handed in his notice the very same day. As for me… Colm has made it clear that I can come back any time I want. I don’t think I will.</p>
<p class="western">The #135 is still on the road. Last thing I heard, she runs smoother than ever. Not a single incident since… well, the incident. Or at least so I’m told.</p>
<p class="western">I can still sometimes hear it, though. Not often, but… sometimes. The footsteps, like there’s someone in the hall. The laughter, almost as if it was one of the neighbours out on the balcony, but not quite. I can still hear it.</p><h4 class="western">Alexandria</h4><h3 class="western">[AUDIBLY EXHAUSTED]</h3>
<p class="western">Statement, uh, statement, yes statement ends. Yeah. Ehm. I—we did a follow-up investigation, although there isn’t much to be found. Mr Stoker has somehow gained access to the records of the <em>Garda Síochána</em>, which seem to confirm the statement’s account. The PR department of <em>Burns &amp; Higgins Tourist Transportation</em> declined to comment, as did all the staff members.</p>
<p class="western">Mr Blackwood has unearthed the coroner’s report on the, ahem, unfortunate Justin Webb, which is mostly in agreement with the police, although it does note that somehow, Webb must have managed to remove every single screw in the entire rear of the vehicle at once, since it appears the engine fell straight down, crushing him with the blunt force of its level underside, rather than… tilting and impaling him on a corner?</p>
<p class="western">Sean Burke himself was unavailable for a follow-up interview, due to his death in late 2013. According to the news coverage at the time, he walked in front of a bus and was subsequently run over; the death was officially ruled an accident and the bus driver was not charged.</p>
<p class="western">His widow, Brittany Burke, née Halloway, reported that he had been in therapy for a few months prior to his death, and had initiated divorce proceedings shortly before, accusing her of laughing at him and terrorising him with noises to keep him from sleeping.</p>
<p class="western">Considering all the facts detailed here, an accident remains the most likely situation. Mr Burke himself admitted in his statement to being under a substantial amount of stress due to the high maintenance effort regarding the vehicle in question, and there is no reason to assume that Justin Webb’s death was anything more than the tragic mistake of a workaholic.</p>
<p class="western">I would like to note however, that I ran into some trouble earlier while attempting to record this statement digitally. I asked Mr Stoker for help, who only rolled his eyes and handed me this tape recorder. Before I return to Dunham Hill at the end of my internship, I will address the matter of the Magnus Institute’s lack of proper equipment with Mr Bouchard.</p><h3 class="western">[DOOR OPENS]</h3>
<p class="western">Now how do you turn this thing off… <em>[voice distant]</em> excuse me? Ms James? Could you help me real qui—</p><h3 class="western">[CLICK]</h3>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I wrote this a while back, maybe a month or two ago? I only recently started listening to TMA, and when I wrote this, I was somewhere halfway through S2 or S3, I believe. Held off posting this until today when I was finally catching up to the current episode, so as to not spoiler myself. Now I can suffer every Thursday with the rest of yall, heh.</p>
<p>My ambitions got the better of me and I was gonna try and do this as an audio fic, hence the original character (transfem, like me) to read it. But well, too much ambition too little voice acting talent. Maybe some day.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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